AMERICAN DOG

AMERICAN DOG

Fired

from the belly of original hard rock and the back-breaking wages of physical labor,

American Dog are the authentic shot-gunned heart of rock' n' roll. Hard work, hard livin',

no sleep : grease 'em up with a couple o' cases of the brown elixir of life, shoot it all

towards the bright lights of a nasty club, and you're gonna see an explosion of classic

drinking man's metal that is going to leave headliners shaking in their boots. It's loud,

lewd, and so live you can taste the metal. And fortunately for those who remember the

intense rock passion of Ted Nugent's Free For All tour in '76', or AC/DC unraveling 'For

Those About To Rock' for the first time, or Motorhead waking up the world with Overkill,

American Dog won't be apologizing that they didn't capture the heavy metal insanity of

their live show on record. It's there. Dying Breed sounds awesome and it sounds live and

it reaches out and shakes you. But don't expect cerebral escape into heavy metal worlds of

trolls, demons and fairies. This band is about the blood, getting the juices and oils of

the machine moving so you can pick yourself up and face another day.American Dog.

That's

who they are and that's who you are. And that's the tone set with the military metal of

opener 'Barely Half Alive'. "That song is pretty much our biography", explains

the Band's irrepressible leader Michael Hannon. "I mean, at the time we wrote that,

we were all working construction, and I was waking up at 5:00 every morning to go to work

- all of us were there - and then we worked outside doing construction all day. Then you

go to practice and you get home at 10:00 at night. You've got no life.On those days that

you would wake up at 5:00 in the morning after doing a show, and you hadn't gotten out of

the club 'til 3:00 in the morning, I mean, you're dead I was giving it half of what I

could give. I just had no energy left. And you almost needed alcohol just to turn yourself

into a machine. When you wipe out, you wipe out good. And it was really killing us, it

really was, especially my voice, working outside. I was shot. We were practicing three

nights a week playing at least two shows a week, so you had maybe two nights when you

where home and you could get to sleep by maybe 11:00 and then you would wake up at 5:00.

We did that for about a year.I had big black rings under my eyes. I looked like the

"walking dead". Getting thirsty ? Well relax, there's plenty of alcohol.

"Drank too much" is a well-known Dog anthem, the band's signature t-shirt with

the songs hearty refrain, "I don't remember", I drank too much", making the

rounds all over the beer gut rust belt and beyond. "That's an old salty dog song that

never got released", begins Michael (For those who don't know, Michael was a member

of Geffen act Salty Dog, a well regarded blues metal band who had a huge ol' time Zep hit

with "Come along". Michael also punched the clock with Dangerous Toys) I wrote

the chorus to that song when I was taking a piss.We were at a Salty Dog practice in East

L.A., a really horrible place; you could hear gunshots every time you stepped outside to

take a piss and it was weird, I was thinking 'what the hell did I end up doing last night

?' And I said to myself 'I don't remember, I drank too much', and went back into practice

I yelled at our drummer at the time, 'dude, play a country western drum beat', and I said

to the guitar player 'do some country picking', and I started singing that chorus, and

taht was it, the song was done" It's a rollicking, foaming, loveable mess of a track,

with a starting pistol of a kick-off that is in fact, a chorus of opening beer cans.

Michael explains. "That's was the most fun ! We had thirty of our closest friends

come down to the studio to sing the background vocals, and man, we had eight cases of

beer, two bottles of Jack, we got a bunch of steacks and some hot dogs and built a fire,

and had a good old fashioned cookout and a good drunk. And the hardest part for these

people, once you get drinking, they just keep going down. So I got everybody drinking real

good first, and then when we went in to record, I wanted to capture them all and the next

beer I gave them, which they could not open, was like eating on them ! You got thirty

drunks in a room, and nobody can open a beer. So if you listen, when they crack it open,

you hear 'oohhh', this huge sigh of the relief from all these drunks. And Eric More from

The Godz was there as well. They're local legends. We've got him guesting on that

one.We've got all that on video, which' ll be a neat thing to show one day. Then there's a

second hurtin' headed anthem, 'Drinkin' About You' also built on the band's sly and

slippery second nature bluesiness. "I love women," offers Hannon with a wink of

an eye. "They rank second only to breathing in my favorite things to do. But goddamn

it, sometimes they can corrode away at your brain, so I keep drinking about you,

baby." At t(he tail end of the album, you'll find the band's most cold blue and

metallic track thus far, T.V. Disease' being built around vicious delicious riff, o'er

which Hannon's sandpaper vocals warn of mental surrender to the idiot box. " I think

that's one of the best lyrics on the whole damn album. It's about thinking on your own.

Don't be a fool. just because it's on TV, doesn't mean taht it's true. I mean, TV stations

are all run by the advertisers anyway. The riff is more of a Dio, Sabbath thing, isn't it

? It's probably the heaviest and slowest things on there. At the end when we do all that

drum stuff, we call it " Dio goes to Brazil". Closing out the record are a

couple of manic covers and an impromptu blues jammer called " She Had It

Comin'," three gestures that are tied together nicely through Hannon's metal

knowledge and sick sense of humour. " Under The Blade" happened because we had

done it for a compilation. And I had just played with Dee Snider, so I had a big Twisted

Sister bug up my ass. And I thought we just destroyed the song, did it great. " Next

up is "Straightjacket" by Australia's the Angels, known as Angel City in

America. "That was just a song I was playing for the guys one day. They just thought

it was great, so we did it, Doc Neeson kind of starts babbling in one part, those drunken

Australians, so I thought, you know, Alice Cooper always sung "The Ballad Of Dwight

Fry" in a straitjacket, so I thought it would be really clever if I just started

screaming the Alice Cooper lyrics at the end, and it worked. So that fades into the next

song, "She Had It Comin', which we did live, one take, at some show in Newark, Ohio.

Nobody knew what was going on. It was at this biker thing out in a field. We were playing

on the back of a semi. I just started playing A in the blues beat, everybody just came in

and we kind of cued off. I had just gone through my divorce, and I was a really angry man,

and it's a song about killing a woman, which is kind of an insanity thing. So it makes

sense coming outof "Straightjacket". And to make it sound old and authentic we

just put that scratchy record noise over it. I guess that's our stab at production.

It's

a fitting close to an album full of such lusty, boozy hard rock octane, almost a stumbling

bring-me-down after reality about tomorrow sinks in, a reality which is already peeking

its daylight headlights through the curtains in yer head. You probably drank too much, and

you might not remember much, but those bruises let you know you've been rocked hard and

put away soused. Indeed, no record in recent memory has sprayed this much alcoholic

buzzmagic into the shoe-gazing realm of today's sorry-ass rock 'n 'roll. If the gods of

rock can remember what weekends are for, American Dog should be blasting out of radios all

over the night time sky. Take the first swing and remember what it was like being 17, car

keys in hand, the metal as your best friend, living, breathing,eating and drinking Back in

Black or whatever it was that gave you those great guitar-fueled memories that will last

you a lifetime. You're holding it in you hand. You're looking at it. Dying Breed is the

shot of the good stuff that will re-fan those flames. Now, bottoms up !

Band

members :

- Michael Hannon

- Steve Theado

- Keith Pickens

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